The example that I think most native English speakers learn at some point is the reason for the distinction in food words: we eat pork (porc) and beef (boef) but they are the flesh of the pig/swine (Schwein) or cow (Kuh). This reflects the elite's use of French (thus using French words for food on the table) while the English servants used their Germanic vocabulary for the animals they worked with.
In both French and German the same word is used for the animal in the field and on the plate.
And then there are innumerable hybrids (anglicized french words). With regards to food and husbandry, one my of favorites is "beeves" ("cattle" -- "beefs"): while I have never heard the word spoken aloud I have seen it in novels even as late as the early 60s.
On the beef thing: French: "biftek" from the English: "beef steak", beef from boef. The borrow words come full circle!
The French used to routinely boil their beef but during a lengthy Parisian siege, the locals noticed that the peoples that they came to call "les rosbifs", roasted their beef (phnaaar!) We were chucking steaks on the barbies long before Australia was even thought of ... or something jingoistic 8)
These essays are a bit of fun, as you say. History and life and language are rather more messy than many would like. At one point the article witters on about France and Wessex. Both terms were valid "back then" and are still valid now but they are sodding complicated ideas and neither mean the same now as they used to.
Even the notion of English (and French - obviously) is pretty tricky. Nowadays, in the UK alone we have a largely homogenised language, with some localisations ... on the surface. For example: jitty - allyway, bairn - child, skritch - cry. Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English. So a Devonshire bird like my mum spoke what sounded like complete twaddle to a modern (!) lad like myself, when she was a child.
You (@gumby) might know the difference between twaddle and twiddle but I am sure I've lost a few readers right there.
My point is that language, nationality and the like are rather more fluid than people generally think.
I have the etymology bug. Interestingly as I have been on meditative trail rides recently, I have been thinking about a desire to compile the etymology of the corpus of words used in tech.
And was wondering if there might be an easy way to build a a tech geneology/etemology tree.
>"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon.
I heard the same anecdote about the upper classes adopting French after 1066 but the farmers still calling the thing by its animal name. Trust the Germans to just continue smashing nouns together, Schweinefleisch, Rindfleisch and my American wife's favorite: "Hackfleisch" (hacked flesh). Too bad Germany didn't get invaded by the French until Napoleon.
English "smashes words together" too - English is full of compounds (e.g. shopkeeper), it's just a much slower process, often goes via a long intermediate period of hyphenation, and the implied difference in meaning is a bit smaller.
The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated.
E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound)
Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché.
But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity.
We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.
It's not so much that the upper classes adopted French after 1066, it's that the upper class was replaced by people that spoke Norman French.
If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.
One of the best Christopher Hitchend quotes is about English/German compatibility:
> Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.
I learnt the word beeves while reading the Doctrine (the PHP ORM) codebase. I assume it was in case someone had an entity called beef... So the collection would be beeves :) I wonder if anyone ever used Doctrine and had an entity called beef.
If you have an interest in English and the evolution of the language you must check out the YouTuber Simon Roper.
There's no finer student of the subject than him and I appreciate that he starts every video with "I am not [a] formally qualified linguist," yet he has a deeper understanding than most.
Some of my favorite videos:
- Celtic Influence on English [0]
- Progressing Some Words from Proto-Germanic to English [1]
- A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries [2]
- A Northern US Accent from the 18th to the 21st Centuries [3]
- Old English and Middle English; why are they so different? [4]
Of course, if you are into podcasts, there is the fantastic “The History of English” podcast by Kevin Stroud.
He has been taking an historical journey through the development of English from proto-Indo-European and is currently up to the Elizabethan period and 172 episodes so far. There are also lots of side trips to specific topics to mix things up. Very enjoyable listen.
Simon Roper is great. I was amused how I could understand the 'English' by the late 14th century pronunciation, but understood less when I was in Dublin in the 21st century when native hiberno-English speakers conversed together.
> One of Charlemagne’s last descendants to be king of West Francia – the predecessor kingdom to France – grew up in the court of his uncle, King Æthelstan of Wessex in the tenth century.
Just to put things in perspective, Franks were a Germanic people and were much more culturally affine to the Anglo-Saxons.
Charlemagne didn't speak "French" so it's no surprise Louis IV didn't either.
The Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries. Old French evolved during this time before the norman conquest.
Because the people of the Mediterranean were as imprecise as westerners are when referring to other people. They called "franks" any people in the west that didn't speak Greek. In the same way as many today call arabs any people that are Muslim even if thet are Turks or Iranians
> Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries
Good place to point out that those Germanic speakers had a major impact on French, and to this day it is by far the most heavily influenced by Germanic, of all the languages descended from Latin.
For example: attaquer (attack). craquer (crack), affreux (fright), hautesse (height), saisir (seize), taper (tap), trier (tear). (I've given English cognates in parentheses, not translations -- "taper" means more like "to slap".)
In fact, Germanic borrowings are around 10 - 20% of French vocabulary.
Some words in English have actually cycled between the Germanic and Romance branches multiple times because of this. For example, Old French had a verb, something like "warder". Probably borrowed from Frankish. English borrowed "warden" from Norman French. Later, sound change in French shifted /w/ to a /gw/ sound, so warder -> guarder. English borrowed the word again, giving us "guardian". In this particular case, English also kept the original fully Germanic form - "warder" (noun).
> Franks were a Germanic people and were much more culturally affine to the Anglo-Saxons.
It very much depends on what you mean by Franks. As with everything in History, terms themselves have a history that must be understood.
Clovis-era Franks were a Germanic people. Later in the Merovingian era not so clearly, as Germanity wasn't a defining characteristic of the Franks as a people and Germanic origins were seemingly forgotten.
The push East under the later Merovingians and early Carolingians likely produced more Germanic-speaking Franks than there were before.
As for Charlemagne, while he couldn't indeed speak a language that didn't exist yet (French), considering the area his family was based around as well as his constraints and style of government, it would be surprising if he wasn't bilingual in Gallo-Romance and High German. Bilingualism is heavily implied throughout the Carolingian era in a lot of the written source, and explicit by the end.
High German didn't exist yet, though. The High German sound shift hadn't happened yet.
At that time all the West Germanic dialects would have been closer to what we call "Low" Germanic now; Dutch, Low Saxon, Frisian, etc. Harder consonants where German now has softer ones.
And I imagine it was probably easier for them to muddle through mutually understanding each other back then.
But yes, in addition to Gallo-Romance, he probably spoke something similar to Old Low Franconian, which eventually became Dutch.
The Frankish nobility would have been a minority in a land which was majority Romance speaking (Gaulish having unfortunately died out out by then). And at a certain point they were very interested in emulating and continuing the lineage of the western Roman empire, explicitly taking up late Roman styles and practices. Adopting Latin and Gallo-Romance speech would be just part of this.
Happened with the Goths in Spain as well.
It's interesting to compare to Anglo-Saxon England where this did not happen and the native Brittonic speech as well as late Romano-British Latin was wiped out.
The one that endlessly peeves me is that English broadcasters (e.g. BBC, The Economist) will bend over backwards to pronounce French words yet for Spanish words they trample all over them. The frequency with which they mispronounce "junta" is maddening.
This is because French is/was the defacto choice for foreign language option in secondary schools throughout the UK, at least up until the 2000s. French was after all the language of diplomacy and quite a bit more useful in European business last century than Spanish was.
Spanish is now catching up and will likely over take in the next couple of years. Latest number of GCSE exam entrants were about 125K for French, 115K for Spanish and 35K for German.
Many words have been anglicized and so 'junta' wouldn't mean anything to English speakers with a Spanish j. But with a hard j, it has exactly the same meaning to us as it does to you. English is an excellent thief but not respectful of the origins. Even the giant % of the English language that is French, we pronounce in our own way.
Are you in the UK? In the US it would sound very off to hear “junta” with a hard “j”.
That doesn’t mean that English speakers try to fully reproduce how a Spanish speaker would pronounce the word and I think that is appropriate. If you are speaking one language to completely switch pronunciation for one word just breaks the flow of speech. Some compromise can be found.
I think "junta" has had anglicised equivalents for pretty much as long as it's been a word in Spanish
Whereas many French derived words are either ostentatiously still-French like foodstuffs or would sound ridiculous with an attempted Anglo pronunciation, eg cafe. We don't exactly fall over to make marmalade or aviation sound French
Plus we're terrible at pronouncing the 'j' sound even when it's part of a Spanish person's name
> In America, the reverse is true. Most French words are butchered
And inconsistently so!
I've had jury duty several times, and nobody can agree on how to pronounce voir dire. Some courts say "vwahr deer" which is a decent approximation of the French pronunciation, and others say "vore dyer". And while I haven't heard it myself, I wouldn't be surprised if some people pronounce voir as "voyeur".
> most Spanish words are at least pronounced properly (sometimes with an accent)
And that accent is almost never Spanish. It’s either Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. My Spanish accent is very much Chicano, because I grew up in such a neighborhood in Southern California. Castilian Spanish sounds effete to me, and of course I sound uneducated to someone from Madrid.
Also, these pronunciations are far more common in the coastal states than flyover country.
I don't know why people complain of this. Spaniards don't particularly pronounce English words in a very English manner either. They Spaniardize lots of English words: Football, Goal, Twitter, Pub, CD-ROM. Who cares!
You would go absolutely postal over our pronunciation of Icelandic volcano names 8)
I do accept that junta should be pronounced "hunta" (in English). Spanish is easily an important enough language that most people that use a Roman style alphabet should be able to fix up pronunciation of those words/letters to suit the language in play.
I often notice that BBC news starts off with an awful pronunciation for a place, concept or whatever that might be considered obscure and then it gets better later on, once someone has noticed and the message has been passed through to the news reader.
I think that the last time our news readers had to deal with the pronunciation of junta was in the 1980s and Argentina. It's 2024 now and I hope we treat Spanish with the respect it is due.
I suppose this is because in the UK there is still this whiff of upper class and culture if you can speak French. The new King Charles was the first monarch to give a speech in the French parliament (afaik), and he did it in French, for instance.
Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
There is still an expectation that even mildly posh British people know how to pronounce French words at least approximately correctly.
Speaking French was historically a strong class marker. The phrase "pas devant les domestiques" which as sufficiently commonly used to be contracted to just "pas devant" is a good example (you would not use it if the domestics would understand it).
I was born in a country (Sri Lanka) where speaking English is a class marker. Not simply whether you can or can not speak it (lots of people can speak it to some extent) but how well you speak it, your accent, and whether you are a native speaker (in that it is the language you use to talk to your family and friends) or not.
If you want to feel better about British willingness to butcher French too (ignoring the huge chunk of older loanwords from French - e.g. most -ion words and -ment words, maby other large groups), look up the English village of Beaulieu (named by French monks, so it's the French "beau lieu"), and how the English pronounce it.
It was maddening to me when visiting the place.
But as Alexandre Dumas reputedly said, English is just badly pronounced French (ok, so that is an exaggeration; and I cant be bothered to check if that statement is apocryphal or not)
It's not as butchered as you think. Some of it is simply older (Norman-)French pronunciation fossilized in English. It's similar to how you can find Middle Chinese across Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese or Proto-Germanic in Finnish.
That would make French just badly pronounced Latin. And that Latin was just a puffed up corruption of Proto-Indo-European. Of course, language history is just turtles all the way down. All languages change as we speak them.
At least it got me (barely) passing marks in French lessons at my German school: to write French, I would set up the sentence in my head in English, shake it around violently until all the words not sufficiently French-sounding where replaced with roughly synonymous words that did and then improvised accents and conjugation. Unfortunately that cheat is terribly useless in real life.
I don’t think most people including those from the area would even associate the name with French, so there isn’t the same intentionality. It’s the same with indigenous language-origin or Spanish-origin place names in the US/Canada, our place names in general that are often centuries old and conceptually separate from their origins, and feels quite distinct from intentionally trying to emulate a foreign language pronunciation for one language but butchering words in another language (not that that’s unique to the UK).
Spanish slang from the 90s in my country imported Detroit and Spanish-ized the pronunciation as ditroy.
Since it has the same consonants as detrás, Spanish for behind, it can be used a a synonym for behind and also as an euphemism for the behind part of the body.
The classic English-language (not just British) example is the name of Chile's former dictator. "Pinochet" should be pronounced with a hard 't' at the end, as is the case in Spanish, and not the French silent 't'.
Appropriate for what? The podcast covers soooo much and attempts to catalog all influences from proto-indo-European onward, with a focus on shared word origins and phonetic changes over time. So some of the pronunciation is speculative reconstruction.
I'm currently reading "Queens of the Crusades" by Allison Weir, about the lives of England's Medieval queens, starting from Eleanor of Aquitaine. From the book, the model I have to understand the context of French culture in Medieval England is to think of it as yet another principality within the much larger French cultural umbrella of continental Europe. Eleanor spoke not "French", but Lengadòc or Occitan. She learned Norman French later in life. Her daughter-in-law, Berengaria of Navarre, spoke Castilian like her Castilian mother, and the rest of the Navarrese nobility, along with some Occitan. Later queens came from from the duchy of Provence. Through marriage, they were also duchesses of Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, Gascony - regions that, like England, had cultural and linguistic similarities with the Kingdom of France, but their own independent political history. Some were held nominally as vassals of the French court, some not.
That sounds interesting, I think I need to put that on my reading list.
It's hard for people now to think about history outside of the context of the relatively ordered national boarders that exist today. Most of the modern countries of Europe didn't exist in the medievil period, and many are less than a couple of hundred years old. I think it would surprise a lot of people if you told them that "Italy" as a country, is younger than the USA, or that "Spain" was a pretty young country when Columbus sailed the Atlantic.
And as you say, even ones like France, that had a "top king" so to speak, were really loose associations of dukedoms and minor kingdoms.
> Previously predominant links to Scandinavia were replaced by ones with France
William the Conqueror actually was a distant but direct descendant of Rollo [1], a viking who invaded Normandy. The influence of Scandinavian language was quite strong, as many names come from scandinavian [2]. So the French William brought to England was probably still a bit scandinavian.
> From Anglo-Norman cul. prit, contraction of culpable: prest (d'averrer nostre bille) 'guilty: ready (to prove our case)', words used by prosecutor in opening a trial, mistaken in English for an address to the defendant.
Readit News
The example that I think most native English speakers learn at some point is the reason for the distinction in food words: we eat pork (porc) and beef (boef) but they are the flesh of the pig/swine (Schwein) or cow (Kuh). This reflects the elite's use of French (thus using French words for food on the table) while the English servants used their Germanic vocabulary for the animals they worked with.
In both French and German the same word is used for the animal in the field and on the plate.
And then there are innumerable hybrids (anglicized french words). With regards to food and husbandry, one my of favorites is "beeves" ("cattle" -- "beefs"): while I have never heard the word spoken aloud I have seen it in novels even as late as the early 60s.
The French used to routinely boil their beef but during a lengthy Parisian siege, the locals noticed that the peoples that they came to call "les rosbifs", roasted their beef (phnaaar!) We were chucking steaks on the barbies long before Australia was even thought of ... or something jingoistic 8)
These essays are a bit of fun, as you say. History and life and language are rather more messy than many would like. At one point the article witters on about France and Wessex. Both terms were valid "back then" and are still valid now but they are sodding complicated ideas and neither mean the same now as they used to.
Even the notion of English (and French - obviously) is pretty tricky. Nowadays, in the UK alone we have a largely homogenised language, with some localisations ... on the surface. For example: jitty - allyway, bairn - child, skritch - cry. Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English. So a Devonshire bird like my mum spoke what sounded like complete twaddle to a modern (!) lad like myself, when she was a child.
You (@gumby) might know the difference between twaddle and twiddle but I am sure I've lost a few readers right there.
My point is that language, nationality and the like are rather more fluid than people generally think.
Was hal!
Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic languages.
Drinkhail! ;-)
Seen that word, with that spelling, IIRC, in Iranian restaurant menus in India.
And was wondering if there might be an easy way to build a a tech geneology/etemology tree.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon.
The "smashing" together of words is much less interesting to most of us who use languages that does so than it seems to be to others - it does little more than placing the words adjacent to each other does in English, with the exception that it disambiguated.
E.g. "hakke" on it's own is the verb to hack in Norwegian, but as part of a compound it will mean something that has been hacked, or is hacking (e.g. hakkespett = woodpecker - and there's another English compound)
Funnily, Norwegian (and Danish) has imported the French boef - Norwegian as "biff" - while we still use the Germanic ku for cow - but we also "smash" words together, so hakkebiff = hakkebøf (Danish) = boef haché.
But "hakke biff" would imply the act of chopping it. And so we compound to remove the ambiguity.
We also have flesk, from the same origin as fleisch and flesh, but in Norwegian it specifically means pork flesh, so hakkeflesk, while it's not a term I can remember having heard, would be understandable but refer to pork because the meaning of combining the words is fairly generic.
Read up on the Holy Roman Empire. Germany, France etc are quite complicated concepts.
If you examine the richest landed gentry in England today a very sizeable number still bare the family names of those that fought for William at the Battle of Hastings.
> Der Brand (The Fire), by the historian Jörg Friedrich, accuses Winston Churchill of a conscious policy of airborne terrorism against civilians … The word “brand” in English, of course, carries a distinctly different vernacular meaning.
The upper classes were French after 1066 (Harold had definitively repelled the Danes for the last time just three weeks before Hastings).
Deleted Comment
Pig/pork = cochon / porc
cow/beef = vache / boeuf
chicken/chicken = poulet/poulet
fish/fish = poisson/poisson
We'd say "vache" when it comes to milk or the female, but all "vache" are "boeuf".
Boeuf is used when the gender does not mean much (like for meat).
Cochon and porc are both used for the live animal, and both used for the food as well (cochon is a bit less used for food, but still common enough).
Boeuf and vache aren’t really synonymous as another commenter pointed out
Their origin, I mean. I can google, but it's more fun to hear what others have to say. And argue, and put them down and up - or try to :)
Attitude frowned on by HN, I know, only they don't (seem to) know they are doing it themselves, via the voting mechanism, i.e. upvotes and downvotes.
Also, it's interesting that there are so many words for horses in English and Western (cowboy slang, I just made up the word :)
Deleted Comment
Ehh, in German we talk about Rindfleisch, which comes from a Kuh.
There's no finer student of the subject than him and I appreciate that he starts every video with "I am not [a] formally qualified linguist," yet he has a deeper understanding than most.
Some of my favorite videos:
- Celtic Influence on English [0]
- Progressing Some Words from Proto-Germanic to English [1]
- A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries [2]
- A Northern US Accent from the 18th to the 21st Centuries [3]
- Old English and Middle English; why are they so different? [4]
---
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCx43I2Vio
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F72jkM9An5Y
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXaXnQv6knQ
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWI_dFxbzyg
He has been taking an historical journey through the development of English from proto-Indo-European and is currently up to the Elizabethan period and 172 episodes so far. There are also lots of side trips to specific topics to mix things up. Very enjoyable listen.
Just to put things in perspective, Franks were a Germanic people and were much more culturally affine to the Anglo-Saxons.
Charlemagne didn't speak "French" so it's no surprise Louis IV didn't either.
The Latin substrate in the territory of modern France was so strong that it gradually took over the Germanic ruling class over centuries. Old French evolved during this time before the norman conquest.
Good place to point out that those Germanic speakers had a major impact on French, and to this day it is by far the most heavily influenced by Germanic, of all the languages descended from Latin.
For example: attaquer (attack). craquer (crack), affreux (fright), hautesse (height), saisir (seize), taper (tap), trier (tear). (I've given English cognates in parentheses, not translations -- "taper" means more like "to slap".)
In fact, Germanic borrowings are around 10 - 20% of French vocabulary.
Some words in English have actually cycled between the Germanic and Romance branches multiple times because of this. For example, Old French had a verb, something like "warder". Probably borrowed from Frankish. English borrowed "warden" from Norman French. Later, sound change in French shifted /w/ to a /gw/ sound, so warder -> guarder. English borrowed the word again, giving us "guardian". In this particular case, English also kept the original fully Germanic form - "warder" (noun).
It very much depends on what you mean by Franks. As with everything in History, terms themselves have a history that must be understood. Clovis-era Franks were a Germanic people. Later in the Merovingian era not so clearly, as Germanity wasn't a defining characteristic of the Franks as a people and Germanic origins were seemingly forgotten. The push East under the later Merovingians and early Carolingians likely produced more Germanic-speaking Franks than there were before.
As for Charlemagne, while he couldn't indeed speak a language that didn't exist yet (French), considering the area his family was based around as well as his constraints and style of government, it would be surprising if he wasn't bilingual in Gallo-Romance and High German. Bilingualism is heavily implied throughout the Carolingian era in a lot of the written source, and explicit by the end.
At that time all the West Germanic dialects would have been closer to what we call "Low" Germanic now; Dutch, Low Saxon, Frisian, etc. Harder consonants where German now has softer ones.
And I imagine it was probably easier for them to muddle through mutually understanding each other back then.
But yes, in addition to Gallo-Romance, he probably spoke something similar to Old Low Franconian, which eventually became Dutch.
Happened with the Goths in Spain as well.
It's interesting to compare to Anglo-Saxon England where this did not happen and the native Brittonic speech as well as late Romano-British Latin was wiped out.
Spanish is now catching up and will likely over take in the next couple of years. Latest number of GCSE exam entrants were about 125K for French, 115K for Spanish and 35K for German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...
That doesn’t mean that English speakers try to fully reproduce how a Spanish speaker would pronounce the word and I think that is appropriate. If you are speaking one language to completely switch pronunciation for one word just breaks the flow of speech. Some compromise can be found.
when billions retrain their mother tongue to learn English and accents, it would be a minimal respect to try to learn the origin.
For when, GWB invaded Iraq he didn't even ever have the decency to learn to pronounce the country's name - and neither does the populace still.
Whereas many French derived words are either ostentatiously still-French like foodstuffs or would sound ridiculous with an attempted Anglo pronunciation, eg cafe. We don't exactly fall over to make marmalade or aviation sound French
Plus we're terrible at pronouncing the 'j' sound even when it's part of a Spanish person's name
I suspect it has something to do with proximity to native speakers of the language, as France (effectively) borders the UK and Mexico borders the US.
And inconsistently so!
I've had jury duty several times, and nobody can agree on how to pronounce voir dire. Some courts say "vwahr deer" which is a decent approximation of the French pronunciation, and others say "vore dyer". And while I haven't heard it myself, I wouldn't be surprised if some people pronounce voir as "voyeur".
And that accent is almost never Spanish. It’s either Mexican, Cuban, or Puerto Rican. My Spanish accent is very much Chicano, because I grew up in such a neighborhood in Southern California. Castilian Spanish sounds effete to me, and of course I sound uneducated to someone from Madrid.
Also, these pronunciations are far more common in the coastal states than flyover country.
In a bar I would order "bocadillo con jamon y queso" and they'd say, "Oh, you speak Spanish!"
I do accept that junta should be pronounced "hunta" (in English). Spanish is easily an important enough language that most people that use a Roman style alphabet should be able to fix up pronunciation of those words/letters to suit the language in play.
I often notice that BBC news starts off with an awful pronunciation for a place, concept or whatever that might be considered obscure and then it gets better later on, once someone has noticed and the message has been passed through to the news reader.
I think that the last time our news readers had to deal with the pronunciation of junta was in the 1980s and Argentina. It's 2024 now and I hope we treat Spanish with the respect it is due.
Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
Speaking French was historically a strong class marker. The phrase "pas devant les domestiques" which as sufficiently commonly used to be contracted to just "pas devant" is a good example (you would not use it if the domestics would understand it).
I was born in a country (Sri Lanka) where speaking English is a class marker. Not simply whether you can or can not speak it (lots of people can speak it to some extent) but how well you speak it, your accent, and whether you are a native speaker (in that it is the language you use to talk to your family and friends) or not.
And shared a king: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_Spain
It was maddening to me when visiting the place.
But as Alexandre Dumas reputedly said, English is just badly pronounced French (ok, so that is an exaggeration; and I cant be bothered to check if that statement is apocryphal or not)
At least it got me (barely) passing marks in French lessons at my German school: to write French, I would set up the sentence in my head in English, shake it around violently until all the words not sufficiently French-sounding where replaced with roughly synonymous words that did and then improvised accents and conjugation. Unfortunately that cheat is terribly useless in real life.
It cracks me up that the Foundland wasn't good enough (some place in the UK), so off they went to find New!
For example “claret” meaning Bordeaux blend wine is pronounced with a hard t
That is literally a valid movement of the tongue to produce a retroflex [ɭ].
In contrast, Spanish phonology lacks retroflex entirely.
Spanish slang from the 90s in my country imported Detroit and Spanish-ized the pronunciation as ditroy.
Since it has the same consonants as detrás, Spanish for behind, it can be used a a synonym for behind and also as an euphemism for the behind part of the body.
Imagine if “junta” had taken a trip up through Central Europe and then to the Scandinavians, then down, so we could pronounce it “yunta.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assegaai
Berber -> Arabic -> Spanish -> Dutch -> English
each link makes sense if you consider (in order) Caliph Al-Walid, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V (or Charles the Bold?), and William III
I have heard too many people say "jally pea no", but the most frequent pronunciation of jalepeño is with a hard j
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
It's hard for people now to think about history outside of the context of the relatively ordered national boarders that exist today. Most of the modern countries of Europe didn't exist in the medievil period, and many are less than a couple of hundred years old. I think it would surprise a lot of people if you told them that "Italy" as a country, is younger than the USA, or that "Spain" was a pretty young country when Columbus sailed the Atlantic.
And as you say, even ones like France, that had a "top king" so to speak, were really loose associations of dukedoms and minor kingdoms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanished_Kingdoms
William the Conqueror actually was a distant but direct descendant of Rollo [1], a viking who invaded Normandy. The influence of Scandinavian language was quite strong, as many names come from scandinavian [2]. So the French William brought to England was probably still a bit scandinavian.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollo [2] (French only) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymie_normande#Toponymie_n...
* cease and desist
* aiding and abetting
* assault and battery
> From Anglo-Norman cul. prit, contraction of culpable: prest (d'averrer nostre bille) 'guilty: ready (to prove our case)', words used by prosecutor in opening a trial, mistaken in English for an address to the defendant.
Dead Comment